


object permanence

by zhujungjungting (runswithchopsticks)



Category: NU'EST, Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Angst, M/M, very minor blood imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 04:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14742362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runswithchopsticks/pseuds/zhujungjungting
Summary: Jonghyun meets Minhyun at the bus stop and offers him a place to stay.'Minhyun’s now walking away, the floorboard underneath his feet creaking again when he steps near the doorway. Jonghyun curls his fingers into his blanket knowing quite well he’s going to wake up with even more saliva dripping down his face in the morning and Minhyun will be there to greet him with bloodshot eyes and gray-tinted skin.'





	object permanence

**Author's Note:**

> weewoo i'm back with the 2hyun. yeah, i realize this is like.. more than a month since my last work... but at least now i'm done with my thesis (and passed it!!!) and only have about 3 more research projects and one more exam before i'm done

_start._

* * *

Perhaps it’s not so much the time to shed more tears, although it requires a willpower that even the strongest and brightest of the population don’t possess. A failed business, a failed marriage, a failed family, and Jonghyun wonders if there will ever be any other thing to challenge him in the world. He’s walked all over this Earth, a disease in his head and in his heart, an ailment that he can’t will away no matter how hard he tries. His will used to be strong enough to conquer anything; he used to be full of bright ideas and opportunities and a realism that was calculating and bided for the best outcome, but just like the way a river smooths out the jagged edges and prominent characteristics of a stone, Jonghyun’s just become another gem that’s given way to the forces and pressures of the world, forever lost in the river’s raging tides without even the slightest possibility of being found and recognized for his true value.

How can he have a value, or how can others recognize it when he himself is riddled with struggles, jaded until his veins are practically glowing green? They say that the people that dictate the world are those with the strongest mindsets, wills, and bodies, and certainly they’ve overcome challenges most people can only imagine, but Jonghyun wonders if they’ve ever gone through such emotional turmoil that he has rather than simply laborious work and laborious failures.

There’s something about failing to obtain a network of people--a network of support--and braving this kind of life yourself that makes it feel like your purpose is just to be crushed. Jonghyun’s been holding his own hands in front of himself for as long as he can remember, but now his fingertips are raw and painful and they burn whenever he wraps them around his other hand. Sure, perhaps his family is still alive and they all do care about him, he realizes, but the tacit understanding meant to be the foundations for the development of bonds stronger than steel were never there for him. He’d fake that they were there, replace steel with wood, but then everything would snap and fall apart because it is so brittle and weak.

That’s how he feels now--weak--and he used to pride himself on being one of the strongest people he knew, but now his vigor and vitality have melted amidst the hammering of the wind-driven waves.

There’s just something about walking down a journey of repeated emotional and physical failures starting from an early age that turns people like this: into wisps of their former beings that can only wish to return to the earliest years, but of course nothing can turn back time, and so they’re deflated spirits stuck in a shell of a body who can do nothing but scream.

It’s on one of those days where it’s gray and humid and drizzly, and it feels like the environment is trying to leech the energy out of his body when Jonghyun meets him. He’s just standing at the bus stop, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, body curled inward to shield himself from the wind.

The bus pulls up--it’s not Jonghyun’s bus--and off steps a man that, of course, is an entire stranger. But the most familiar thing about him is that right when both his feet reach the sidewalk, he looks up and sees Jonghyun staring at him, and Jonghyun can’t help but think that he’s seen that expression before. It’s not on another person, no, because he has no clue who this person is, but he’s seen the downturn of the corners of his eyes and the grimace in his lips and the dullness of his gaze and the deep breath of cold and suffocating air, a mental command to keep on walking, before -- Jonghyun’s seen it all in the mirror.

Is it possible to completely build an understanding between two strangers within the span of a second? Maybe it is, because the man approaches Jonghyun with a rolled-up magazine held in the hand of his that’s slightly extended. A single duffel bag, stuffed full, is slung over one shoulder, and the bottoms of his sneakers appear to be covered in mud.

“H-Hi,” he quietly begins.

“Hello,” Jonghyun returns.

“Do you, uh, know where the forty-sixth district is?”

“You’re past it,” Jonghyun answers. He recognized the bus the man stepped off of. “It would’ve been three or four stops before this one.”

“I’m--” and then the man closes his eyes for a moment and takes another deep breath. Jonghyun bites his lip, inhaling sharply through his nose. It’s a reminder for the both of them.

“I’m sorry,” Jonghyun offers apologetically.

“It’s alright,” the man replies. “It’s just-- I’m not from here.”

 _A foreigner?_ Jonghyun thinks, although he doesn’t think that the man has any immediately noticeable accent.

“China,” the man says, quietly, and he raises his head, looking up at the ceiling of the bus stop’s shelter above him. Jonghyun’s eyes flicker up, and he sees the raindrops rolling over the glass panes, leaving broken trails of water, and if he were to focus for long enough, maybe he’d be able to create words out of those wakes.

The man in front of him takes a deep breath, and Jonghyun’s gaze flickers back. He sees the man’s free hand grip at the strap of the duffel. Jonghyun’s suddenly hit with a hunch; maybe the reason why he felt a bit of understanding coming from this person standing in front of him is because there is something between them that’s common, but it’s a characteristic that’s wholly rare.

“You left everything, didn’t you,” Jonghyun states. “You just got up and left everything because you wouldn’t be leaving anything behind anyways.”

His name is Hwang Minhyun, Jonghyun learns. The same age as him. After the death of both his wife and his mother, his last living family member, he’d taken anything and everything that mattered to him and left his country. He had no purpose in returning back to Korea; just a vague sense that he needed to be away from everything that reminded him of the weights that anchored his heart.

Jonghyun doesn’t know how these things are supposed to work. There’s been no one but him in his flat for almost a year now. The two stacks of magazines on the coffee table are dusty, their pages beginning to become stiff and brittle, and there’s still a red paper lantern hanging from a tack stuck into the wall next to the refrigerator. The rest of the coffee table is clean, a few papers, a book, and a remote sitting atop the glass, and the refrigerator itself is void of any magnets except the ones that came with the most recent versions of the local phone books.

“Jonghyun,” Minhyun says, just as Jonghyun drops his keys onto the kitchen counter. Jonghyun pretends not to hear him, instead just whisking down the hall, unsure whether he’s expecting Minhyun to follow or not. When he hears a creak in the carpet floor from a pair of socked feet approaching him, something inside of him clicks with familiarity; he waits for that pair of feet to then brush past him and continue into the living room, but when they come to a stop right behind him, he takes a breath and mentally tells himself to stop pretending.

“Make yourself at home,” he says, quietly, when he turns around and sees Minhyun standing hesitantly there.

Jonghyun walks into his own room, and when he sits down on his bed, he laces his fingers together and asks himself if he’s crazy. He’s just invited a stranger to come and live in his home; Minhyun could be anyone, Jonghyun knows. He could be a criminal on the run, a local gang member, or even an irresponsible teen that’s run away from his parents -- Jonghyun would never know,  he only knows what Minhyun’s told him, and, most importantly, what his instincts tell him.

How do you go about this, where you feel like someone’s understood what your entire lifetime means, but you’re two completely different, separate, and unfamiliar people? How do you figure what to tell, because there are secrets you probably should or should not share, but it already feels like that this person already knows all of them? How do you explain to someone why the lantern and the stacks of magazines are there even though it seems that they immediately knew their purpose when they first glanced at them?

He’d seen Minhyun eyeing them curiously, first the red paper lantern, and then the stacks of magazines once he’d entered the living room. It’s much past the Lunar New Year, not to mention the tissue paper is faded and thinning and the layer of glitter that once covered it is now sparse and patchy.

Jonghyun keeps those things where they are, letting them rot, because he hopes that when the physical objects rot, so will the tangible ties to them as well. Of course, things don’t work that way. A lot of the time, when a person tries to leave behind their own weights, they have to actively seek ways to do so. The iron nails that bolt those steel chains down into the earth will not give way by themselves. There’s always something that has to be done, whether it be someone with a screwdriver helping you undo those bolts or it be you prying at them with your own fingers until your skin is red and blistering and there’s blood caked underneath your nails.

Unfortunately, some people don’t have the energy to do so. Many don’t even know the means to begin.

Perhaps that is where Jonghyun is at, and that is where he has always been, despite the amount of times he tells himself that he’s past those eras of his life, despite the amount of times that he feels strong and hopeful and powerful, only to find out the very next day that that strength is fake. He has always been brittle enough to snap into two with the proper pressure applied to any of his multitudes of weaknesses.

* * *

They say that the city lights at night can create beautiful scenes that are often beheld in movies and books and romanticized in poems and songs, but to Jonghyun, they’re a reminder of everything that’s ever happened to him. Every part of the city, every little nook or crevice in an alley, means something. The streets he walks down are dirty and dusty, and there’s mold on the concrete walls that he passes on his way down to the supermarket, but if he were walking down that exact sidewalk in the middle of the night, he’d somehow manage to lose himself into the very depths of downtown and not be able to find his way home until daylight.

In his ears, he can still hear the ringing from footsteps stampeding down the pavement as the teenage version of himself sprints down the road with his friends, pocket knives in their hands and jackets falling off of their shoulders. He’s breathed in so much of the cold night air that it stings his throat and his eyes, and the taste of blood rises in the back of his mouth. Jonghyun isn’t sure if he ever was happy during that time in his life, because even though his friendships seemed like they were strong, the only reason they stood was because he was protecting them with an artificial version of himself. It was a defense mechanism of some sort, having forced himself to become someone headstrong and wild and inconsiderate, all the traits he never was once, because he’d given up on living a natural life.

And then when he’d realized his mistakes, realized that in the process of protecting himself, he’d driven others away--but most importantly, driven himself away, to the point where he’d look back on his actions and loathe that character he once was--the toxic regret had already begun to settle in.

The nights he’d spend in the middle of these roads with a stomach void of anything besides liquor were the last moments he could remember even being vaguely content. Alcohol is supposedly something that inhibits all the functions in your body that allow you to move and think like a normal human being, except for Jonghyun, it gave him some kind of clarity in his head. Daily doses of night fever and glass bottles of rum were his fake medication.

Of course, like all things that are fake, they all fail at one point or another. He’s long laid off those old habits, because the spark that they’d given him had faded off, just in the same way separation can undo the bond between two friends until they’re almost like strangers -- until they’re basically at the zeroth step once again. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t sometimes think about going back to those times in the same way someone might lament over the memories they created with a friendship that’s long been broken off.

He’s thinking about this exact idea when his eyes settle upon a shattered wine bottle lying next to the sewer grating as he and Minhyun walk down the sidewalk in the late night. It’s dark enough that Minhyun probably didn’t notice the dark green shards stuck into the protruding cracks of concrete and scattered along the rusted iron overlay of the grating, but like every other thing that constantly tries to follow Jonghyun around his entire life--forever there with him like a spirit haunting his person, but hanging far enough away that when it tries to suck away his soul, it can only do so bits at a time--he thinks that it’s purposely there, laid out just for him.

“They won’t fix this anytime soon, will they?” Minhyun asks quietly, and Jonghyun’s shaken out of his stupor to see the other man stopped a few meters in front of him, standing right in front of a deep and raggedy crater in the middle of the road.

“They don’t fix anything around here,” Jonghyun replies, stepping past the indent as if he hadn’t seen it. “Have you noticed that yet?”

“Yes,” Minhyun hums, joining Jonghyun back at his side. “I’ve come to expect it too.”

That question had no intended answer when Jonghyun asked it. Minhyun hasn’t lived here long enough to have gotten used to the environment, and not to mention he hardly sees any part of the city unless it is nighttime. For a moment, Jonghyun’s step stutters. The thought that Minhyun may not necessarily be referring to the road passes over his mind, but the next second, Jonghyun brushes it off as laughable.

Minhyun’s never questioned the reason why Jonghyun only chooses to do things during the nighttime, whether just to be a courteous flatmate or because he somehow inherently understands something Jonghyun doesn’t. To be honest with himself, Jonghyun doesn’t know the reasons for a lot of his own habits, night roaming included. His mother once attempted to attribute it to the fact that reason and logic are naturally inhibited during the hours when the sun is down, but Jonghyun thought it was her trying to blame her son’s drinking problems on something besides what really was the cause: his own lack of self-awareness, control, and objective. It was her way of refusing to acknowledge the fact that Jonghyun’s problems were primarily caused by himself, because very few people, let alone parents, want to admit that they’ve raised a near-useless shell of a human, especially if that shell is their only child.

“Have you eaten yet?” Minhyun asks, after another minute of silence with the exception of the sounds of their shoes against the pavement. It’s an extremely out-of-place thing to ask, especially at a time nearing midnight.

“I forgot,” Jonghyun states simply. “That’s why we are going to buy groceries. It isn’t your responsibility to look after me as well, Minhyun.” He can see Minhyun opening his mouth again to say something, but he quickly cuts Minhyun short. “You didn’t come all the way here to take care of someone. You’ve probably done too much of that again.”

“You’re right.” Minhyun takes a deep breath, and it sounds like a shudder. The air is probably too cold for his lungs. “But I also didn’t come all the way here to make myself feel inadequate again.”

Jonghyun bites his lip and remains silent for the rest of the walk.

* * *

He wakes up in the middle of the night again. It’s one of those occurrences where he has no idea what’s happening or why it’s happening or when it’ll end. His head, neck, and back are drenched in sweat, saliva is frothing out of the corner of his lips, mouth too dry to swallow it down, and even though there is absolutely no light in the room, shadows flit around in the edge of his vision, as if people carrying candles were hovering at his side.

“Oh my god,” he whispers, sitting up, and spit drips out from between his lips. He’s staring down at his lap--although, since it’s dark, he sees nothing--when a floorboard creaks, sharp enough through the silent air that it rings in his head like a gunshot. Instinctively, Jonghyun is grabbing at the knife that’s always tucked in his pillowcase.

“It’s me,” Minhyun whispers, and his voice is harsh, grating, threatening to eat away at Jonghyun’s head.

“O-Okay,” Jonghyun shakily says, his fingers flexing around the hilt of the knife as he forces himself to let go. The next second he’s rubbing at his eyes with one hand and wiping away the drool that coats his chin, but his skin tastes sour and for some reason, his eyes sting.

When he opens his eyes again, blinking away the discolored spots in his vision, Minhyun is setting down the candle he’d been carrying on the nightstand.

“What was it this time?” he asks.

“Like always, I don’t… I don’t remember. At all.” Jonghyun mutters. A shiver runs up his spine and he shudders. The sweat on his head and neck and back is beginning to dry, cooling the air around him. “Why are you up, anyways?”

“I just didn’t sleep,” Minhyun replies, simply. He looks away as he takes a seat on the corner of the mattress. “I laid there for a few hours. If I can’t go to sleep, I might as well use that time to get some work done.”

“You shouldn’t be doing that.” Jonghyun’s words are rasped, and once again, like always, they fall upon deaf ears. “All the things that you hate aren’t going to go away until you sleep, Minhyun.”

“I am perfectly fine,” Minhyun says stiffly. “Right now, what matters is that it isn’t healthy that you keep on getting interrupted in the night like this.”

“Well, what can I do about it?” Jonghyun sighs, brushing back his hair with a palm. “I don’t even know why things are like this. How can I fix something when I don’t even have a clue as to its cause?”

“Hmm.” Jonghyun can’t see it, but Minhyun is smiling slightly. “We can figure that out. For now, I’m just glad that it’s not a gun you keep underneath your pillow.”

“Well, I wish it were a gun,” Jonghyun grumbles.

“Why? So you can shoot the man choking the spit and saliva and living life out of you?”

Jonghyun knows it’s a joke, but his stomach can’t help but feel uncomfortable at hearing Minhyun’s words. “Yeah, exactly,” he retorts, a little too much forced edge in his voice. “Go to sleep. I’m alive and fine and if you don’t sleep, you’re going to collapse tomorrow.”

Minhyun looks away again. He could easily get away with not listening to a single word Jonghyun says, and both of them know this. That’s how it’s been almost the entire time he’s been staying with Jonghyun. There’s too much Jonghyun asks him not to do, and when Jonghyun actually asks him to do something, he acts like he’s heard nothing.

“You don’t need to clean the dishes”, “You don’t need to do the laundry”, “You don’t need to dust that side of the coffee table”, “Don’t reorganize the silverware”, “Don’t take down the paper lantern”. It seems Minhyun’s somehow inherently unable to heed anything that doesn’t involve _don’t._ Maybe in a way, Jonghyun’s asked him to do too much by telling him to _not_ do many things. Even though it was Jonghyun who took him in, and under most circumstances this would imply Minhyun being forever indebted to him, but perhaps living with someone like Jonghyun who has so many _don’ts_ floating around in his head is a chore.

It isn’t a lie that this is who Jonghyun is. He’s conditioned himself to adhere to so many _don’ts_ that he’s naturally pushing them onto his flatmate.

Minhyun’s now walking away, the floorboard underneath his feet creaking again when he steps near the doorway. Jonghyun curls his fingers into his blanket knowing quite well he’s going to wake up with even more saliva dripping down his face in the morning and Minhyun will be there to greet him with bloodshot eyes and gray-tinted skin.

He doesn’t know what prompts him to say this, or maybe he does know, because it’s a reflection of everything that he doesn’t do in life, and he has an instinctive need to defend himself.

“You know,” he begins, raspily, and Minhyun, one step outside of the bedroom, stops in his tracks. “A lot of people wish they could go back in time and change one small thing, because it’s had a huge impact on their present.” Jonghyun licks his lips. Minhyun’s silhouette from the weak flame of the candle he holds is fuzzy in Jonghyun’s eyes. He very well knows he’s lying to himself at that moment. “But nobody ever thinks about applying that thinking to the present.”

“And that’s because we all like lying to ourselves and thinking that we’re doing the best we can in the present,” Minhyun murmurs. Jonghyun almost doesn’t hear his reply, because Minhyun’s voice seems to be carried with him as he continues to walk away.

* * *

“What they want us to think is that we’re just digging ourselves deeper into the hole we’re already in,” Minhyun mutters. Jonghyun looks up in surprise. This is the first of any sort of conflict he’s ever heard Minhyun express.

“But sometimes the hole exists because we exist, you know. It’d be filled with dirt if not for a person standing inside of it.”

Jonghyun eyes him curiously. “Well, it still can be filled, whether a person is inside or not,” he points out. “Be buried alive.”

“And that’s what we’re all afraid is going to happen to us.” Minhyun closes his eyes, letting his head hang back.

“My father used to say that if you believe something won’t happen, then it won’t. And vice versa. If you believe something will happen, then it will,” Jonghyun muses, threading his fingers together in his lap.

“It’s too late for that thinking, isn’t it?” Minhyun says, and he slowly opens one eye, seeing Jonghyun stare directly at him. “A year ago, it wouldn’t have even crossed my mind that I’d be here.”

“Did you think that you’d be buried alive, then?”

“I actually don’t remember what I thought would happen.”

“Then I hope you aren’t being buried alive at the moment.”

The corners of Minhyun’s lips lift just slightly. He’s both trying to smile and naturally smiling at the same time, and it’s the first time in a long while that Jonghyun’s see Minhyun smile without forcing himself to the point where he looks vaguely like he’s grinding his jaw.

Minhyun is tired. His skin is a little grayer than usual, bits of blue and purple shading underneath his eyes, but at least the gleam in his eyes is sharper than the blunted edges of a broken bottle of alcohol.

“If you’re implying that you’re doing something wrong, the only thing you’re doing wrong is assuming that,” Minhyun replies.

“That’s a terribly roundabout way of telling me ‘no’,” Jonghyun states, and now his lips are quirking up just slightly as well. It isn’t easy to aggravate him nowadays, because he’s felt he’s lost the ability to build up so much anger anymore, but instead, all of it falls onto his own chest.

He finds himself reaching out and grabbing at the sleeve of Minhyun’s shirt, right where his wrist is, and clutches onto it tightly, wrinkling the cloth in his grip. Surprisingly, Minhyun doesn’t react.

When Jonghyun stares him in the eyes in this position, leaning over and holding onto him, he sees a lot of things that Minhyun has never bothered to tell him. Whenever Minhyun blinks, his eyelids drag, as if trying their best to remain closed, whether to be in sleep or to be in death. He’s never given an explanation as to why he’s like this; the most Jonghyun knows is what he’d told him the day he met him and a few shallow facts such as his favorite food. Yet, for some reason, that connection, whether fabricated in Jonghyun’s mind or not, still exists, and in the sluggish state of Minhyun’s blinking, Jonghyun can sense the points of his life where he’d been like that. They threaten to rise up in his memory, a bit of their sour taste creeping its way onto his tongue. You might as well be buried alive with such a disconnect between your mind and your body as they each wish for extreme opposites. To some degree, Jonghyun is still like that, except in his case, a third player, his conscious, has forced its way into the equations, and that’s the only thing he listens to until he cannot bear to listen to it anymore.

Minhyun isn’t at that point yet. He’s still managing to retain awareness for both his mind and body simply because he’s strong enough to do so.

Jonghyun wants back that strength no matter how much he’s convinced himself that things won’t ever be like that again, not only just for him, but for people like him.

Here is Minhyun, someone like him, but also different enough, and different in all the right aspects that Jonghyun is unsure if he wants to wish that he met Minhyun at a different point in his life or not.

“You never told me what’s wrong,” Jonghyun says, licking his lips.

“Well, you never asked,” Minhyun points out. “And besides, if there was something wrong with me, you wouldn’t have let me stay with you this long.” He sighs, inhaling through his mouth. “It’s all things that I have no control over.”

“You have control over a few things,” Jonghyun murmurs. His fingers uncurl from Minhyun’s shirt, and instead, his fingertips stroke over the inside of Minhyun’s wrist, before they wrap around. Jonghyun can feel that knob on Minhyun’s wrist poke into his palm.

“As much control as that paper lantern and the left side of the coffee table have over you?” Minhyun’s right eyebrow raises. They’d never discussed the subjects past don’t clean, don’t remove, and don’t touch. “They’re mementos,” Minhyun continues before Jonghyun can even formulate a response. “I would have them too, except I don’t, because I left them in another country.” His lips curl, almost in a shrewd-like manner. “I know everyone always laments about their emotions never going away, but in my case, sometimes they do fade, but the tangible objects are still there, and will always be there.”

“You always know that they’re out there somewhere, even though you can’t see them, huh?” Jonghyun murmurs, dipping his head.

“I didn’t expect you to understand.” Minhyun’s reply takes Jonghyun by surprise. “I always thought your own problems were manifested in your head and your emotions. Not like me, someone who is tied too easily to their environment.”

“Well,” Jonghyun begins slowly. For a moment, he considers the fact that he’s misunderstanding what Minhyun’s saying, but the majority of him thinks that just for the fact Minhyun somehow inherently knew of the the amount of his own troubles that bred and multiplied in his head before he’d painstakingly try to kill off enough of them routinely, makes Jonghyun think that perhaps there’s more to this tacit understanding than just one person. “I do still have the lantern, and the left side of the coffee table is still covered in dust.”

“Such small things can do so much, not just to a person in the present, but to their whole lifetime.” Minhyun shifts his head, and now he’s staring directly at Jonghyun. “Because such small things in the present can have such a huge impact on the future.”

Jonghyun’s body momentarily stiffens. Minhyun’s repeating his own words back to him, but not necessarily in a way that is inflammatory. “Then,” he begins, a moment after, his head tilted towards the hand that’s holding onto Minhyun’s wrist as he glances up to meet Minhyun’s stare, “how do they stack up against big things?”

“That--” Minhyun hums. He wriggles his wrist free of Jonghyun’s grip, but to Jonghyun’s surprise, he takes Jonghyun’s hand in his own. “That,” he continues, “depends on which direction, both physically and figuratively, they force me to go.”

He slots his own fingers into the crevices between Jonghyun’s, gripping as tightly as a person who’s bone-exhausted can.

* * *

Jonghyun used to often wonder how things would go if he didn’t make one small decision. It’s been a long time since he’s had similar thoughts, but seeing the number _46_ on the sign above him makes him wonder if that number was supposed to signify something in his life.

His only motivation that one day he invited Minhyun to live with him, he realized, was simply that desire of his that he’d kept silent of wanting to think that he wasn’t alone. He thinks he can be perfectly content living alone, and to much of a degree, he is -- he never favored being in others’ company for too long, but perhaps it was a case of people and not situation. To him, it was an ugly desire--that is, the desire to think he wasn’t alone--for both the reasons of self-pride and that it was something the world wouldn’t let him have. The bolts at his feet anchor him down too much to allow him to reach out for things higher than his immediate reach.

But he looks around him, at where he’s standing, and sees the broken glass bottle and crushed bottlecaps littering the sidewalk and remembers that one time he had been shaking so badly as he was picking up the broken pieces of a shattered bottle of tonic that he’d cut himself and bled so harshly; he’d laid in a pool of his own blood before mustering enough strength to clean himself.

He sees the blue graffiti drawn all over the cement walls next to him, and remembers the one time where he’d gotten his entire arm covered in blue spray paint because one of his friends accidentally aimed incorrectly as they were decorating the side of a highway bridge.

He sees the gray clouds up ahead, darkening his surroundings and warning of rain, and remembers standing out in a downpour, collecting droplets in his palms and his eyelashes and tongue and refusing to leave despite the freezing of his body, the bluing of his fingertips, and the numbing of his toes, and wishing he could be absorbed into the environment.

And then his eyes settle upon the _46_ again. Was it a big or a small decision that he’d made that day?

If Jonghyun could, maybe he’d put that sign in his pocket and walk away with it. It could become a part of him, even temporarily so, just like his blood and the blue paint and the rain. However, that’s not physically possible, despite it being a physical object. He has to leave it behind, but when he turns and walks away, he consciously knows that it’s going to be there, and will be there for a very long time.

 

When Jonghyun returns home, he finds Minhyun reading on the couch.

“Minhyun,” he says, sitting down, and Minhyun sets down his book, looking over at Jonghyun curiously.

“Welcome back,” Minhyun hums.

“Minhyun,” Jonghyun begins, and his voice is slightly shaky. His palms are warm despite his fingertips freezing, and when he presses them onto the sides of Minhyun’s face, Minhyun immediately jumps. He can’t slip in a question before Jonghyun speaks again.

“Big and small things in the present both can change the future drastically.” His head is dizzy, and at the moment, his own voice is almost deaf to him because of the blood rushing in his ears. “And sometimes, I have trouble distinguishing between them.” At this point, he’s whispering, unsure whether to his own reflection in Minhyun’s pupils or to Minhyun himself. But Minhyun isn’t responding, and Jonghyun at the moment thinks it may be a sign.

“But it doesn’t matter whether they’re big or small; all that matters is that I made the decision.”

Minhyun’s lips against his are strangely cold, even though Jonghyun’s body is warm, and so are the hands that cover his own.

* * *

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> once again thank you viv for proofing <3 especially since this was late at night but then again both of us are kind of nocturnal


End file.
